Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Derek Ridgers photographed nightlife as a place of contact, excess and escape. In his new book, kisses become the quiet centre of that archive.
In ‘Hello, I Love You’, Derek Ridgers narrows decades of street and club photography into a single, disarming gesture. Published by IDEA Books, the book brings together images of couples kissing in clubs, bars, streets and festival grounds across three decades of British nightlife. What emerges is a fragile record of closeness unfolding in public.
Ridgers is known for documenting youth culture with an unsentimental, direct gaze. Punks, skinheads, club kids and ravers have all passed in front of his lens. Here, that same attentiveness settles on moments that are almost incidental. A kiss shared in the corner of a club. Bodies leaning into each other amid music and movement. Faces briefly withdrawing from the surrounding noise. These are not portraits asked for or performed. They are pauses.
Seen today, the photographs carry an added weight. Taken before phones and social media, they belong to a time when intimacy could still unfold without anticipating an audience. The images feel unguarded, sometimes awkward, sometimes tender, always fleeting. Ridgers allows love to appear briefly and then dissolve back into the night.
The project began as a series of limited zines that quickly sold out, later expanding into this carefully edited volume. Read as a whole, ‘Hello, I Love You’ functions as a quiet social history, one told through touch rather than attitude. Love appears as something that happens momentarily, between bodies, in the margins of the crowd, held together by touch rather than narrative.
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